We will not be silenced about genocide

Written by: Louisa L. on 12 July 2025

Several hundred protesters converged on SEC Plating in Belmore on Friday night, two weeks after Hannah Thomas was assaulted by police and charged outside the factory which manufactures components used in Israel’s genocide on Palestinians.

Local teacher, Liv, from Canterbury Bankstown Teachers Association which includes Belmore, spoke first, saying she grew up in Belmore, regularly watching the Bulldogs play at Belmore Oval. ‘I don’t think I could ever have imagined that in this same suburb of Sydney a company would be manufacturing parts for F35 jets,’ she said.

Two weeks earlier, she arrived anticipating another peaceful protest outside the company. Instead, she saw ‘at least ten police officers surrounding a fragile and terribly injured woman’.

‘They weren’t consoling her, or tending to her obvious facial injuries … I asked to cross the road to comfort her, and I was told I would be arrested.

‘I asked police officers if it was their daughter or their sister or their mother if it would be acceptable that they were left for half an hour waiting for an ambulance?

‘As I looked at Hannah standing alone, my heart shuddered … Where was I living? Could this possibly be Australia, where trying to draw attention to a genocide and a company complicit in that genocide will have you surrounded by police, as if you are the criminal?’ she asked.

Peace is union business
‘We cannot afford to be silent, because our silence will not protect us.’

Speaking of ‘unionised workers directly engaged in research and development, manufacture and export of arms to Israel’, she stated, ‘In capitalist society workers have very little control over what they produce. Nobody becomes a transport worker with the intention of furthering the sale of weapons to Israel’ and that ‘many are not even aware. But this work materially supports the genocide of Palestinian people.’

She praised those workers and unions supporting the Palestinian Trade Union Movement’s call to take action against complicit companies, calling out particularly the inspirational refusal of Piraeus Port workers to unload an Israel bound container ship, and the stand of both the ACTU and her union, the NSW Teachers Federation, which say ‘Peace is Union Business’.

Other speeches, several by Palestinians, were just as powerful. They targeted capitalism and Australia’s role as the wagging tail of the US imperialist dog. One pointed out the truth so often ignored, ‘Palestinians did not cause the Holocaust!’

Another told of a mother holding her daughter’s hand after another Israeli attack. Then she and her husband searching for her other body parts to be buried. Part of her body was blasted into a tree. 

What democracy?
Rightly, police were condemned. Along with jails, courts, the legal system, and ultimately the military, they form the iron fist of the capitalist state, the reality of force used to maintain that brutal system of war against our peoples. Individually, some police or judges may believe they defend democracy. But what democracy when it stands on stolen land?

First Peoples have faced treatment like that meted out to Hannah Thomas, that may still result in the loss of one eye, again and again for 230 years. And far worse.

At the start of the protest, as the commanding officer read out a section of the NSW Summary Offences Act (used to attack the poor, the homeless, and protesters since 1966 and updated since then) his voice shook. No wonder! Alongside US-Zionist puppets like Premier Chris Minns or the sorry federal crew like Richard Marles, Penny Wong and Michaelia Cash, he is on the wrong side of history. He told us not to offend people.

Liv, the teacher who spoke first, held up a picture of three little Palestinian children murdered on Thursday. Police told the protest leaders the picture was offensive. But no word about the genocide. No word about the dead children, or the father who buried on them on the day of our protest. 
No more words are necessary to show genocide and this system’s complicity.

But we will not be silent. We will not be silenced. A reckoning is coming.

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